


The Tale of Dr Charles Hardy & His Beautiful Monster

by BluebeardslastBride



Category: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley, Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-20
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-05-09 12:22:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14715938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BluebeardslastBride/pseuds/BluebeardslastBride





	The Tale of Dr Charles Hardy & His Beautiful Monster

_The story takes place in an alternative reality, set in a not so distant, dystopian future._  
_After a chain of global catastrophic events, when the world had been thrown into a destructive war and overwhelmed by natural disasters as flooding and earthquakes, followed by power blackouts and nuclear power station explosions, the humankind had almost wiped itself out. Decades later the concept of countries and states disappeared and the survived folks lived in newly shaped communities or had retreat into big cities, protected by high walls._  
_Dr Charles Hardy is a surgeon with a very strange hobby, who lives and works in one of the biggest cities of the new world. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is his favourite book and for now this is just all you need to know._

 

     The night air was fresh and the sky clear, the full moon shined bright trough the window of Charlie’s Praxis and fell onto a lifeless body lying on the operating table. The moon had painted the silhouette of the corpse into blue. The Doctor was resting on a stool, his white coat and his arms were bloodstained, though it had long dried and looked now black when the moonlight touched it. The only sound breaking through the silence was the ventilator breathing air into and out of the dead bodies lungs. The cardiac monitor was flickering and showed an unstable, forced heart rate, but no other sign of life. The AI surgical assistant was waiting for instructions to turn off the machine; the lamp of the robotic computer was burning red - confirming a clinical death. Charlie was exhausted, he wanted to get out of this room, wash away all blood from his skin, wash away the feeling of frustration. He urged to jump up, wrack everything on his way out and slam the door behind him. But he couldn’t. He could not take his eyes from the young mans body that was lying before him. The Doctor could not tell how long he had been staring but regarding the day had already turned into night, he must have been sitting there for hours. Then, after a few more moments, he left out a deep sigh while he slowly rose and made two steps towards the lifeless man. Charlie looked down at the beautiful face, the pretty lips, the straight nose, the long lashes, the blond hair. The man must have been in his early twenties, he thought and remembered something, that Edgar Allan Poe had once written in a philosophical essay: _The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world._ Or that of a beautiful man, the Doctor continued the thought, and his eyes wandered down to the disfigured body. Deep incisions were cut into his white flesh. Starting at top of each shoulder and running down in front of the chest, meeting in the middle at the breastbone and extending further down beneath the waistline. The cuts indicated how his ribs had been spread and his heart removed. Charlie found the body with an opened ribcage, but he had no doubt the unknown man had been still conscious in the moment while he was cut open with surgical precision, his last memory - the face of his torturer till everything disappeared in pain an darkness. Nothing about this felt poetic to Charlie. 

At first it seemed like the man had become a victim of Organ Piracy, but it did not make any sense why the most prosecuted dealers of the biggest black market would leave behind other perfectly healthy and by all means highly valuable insides. The Doctor tried not to think of alternative perverse motives, presuming the dazzling beauty of the man might have been more than a plain coincidence.  
Attempting to resurrect him, the Doctor replaced that empty place in his chest with a perfectly fitting, synthetic heart and printed a new breastbone with the medical 3D printer, transplanted stem cells, blood and performed a 12 hour operation with his assistant of an artificial intelligence. But in the end he failed to reactivate the brain function, a common outcome in his practice, something that had happened before, but never felt this sore. The unknown body would stay dead forever, the flesh would never heal, the eyes would never open to meet the Doctors.   
At that moment he thought of Victor Frankenstein’s monster, but no, monster was not exactly the word one could have ever used to describe this beautiful creature with, not even in this state. More than that Charlie himself felt like one. He had brought the dead back to life before, just like Frankenstein. Men and women who had been proclaimed dead, were walking the earth once again, but with their desecrated bodies and violated minds - having neither a memory of the past nor hope for a future. Of course science had advanced tremendously since Mary Shelley had written her novel, but death was still inevitable and involuntarily, a painfully unromantic reality which everyone had to face sooner or later. Only that later could be extended to a much later point than predestined by nature. Since the chemical and nuclear war had polluted the air, water and what was still left of the environment, it resulted in shortening lifespans of every living organism on the planet. On which all scientists and researcher joined together, out of pure necessity, to save humanity from extinction. A great scientific progress took place and a few generations later, when the balance was virtually restored, the pursuing of continuous renewal remained and the idea of immortality grew strong. One of many dark sides behind this trend was the tremendous growth of human organ trafficking, for reasons that real human body parts adopted better and were cheaper than the laboriously developed ones, which needed to be constantly replaced.

  
Charlie raised his hand and stroked the blonde hair. It was soft, but knots of dried blood made it feel partly coarse.  
_‘Angel,'_ he whispered softly, as he touched the bruised cheek. When he gently stroked the firm muscle of the dead mans arm, the skin felt utterly cold under his touch. His hand wandered further down to the sides, where the flesh was unharmed, then his grip tightened on one of the slender thighs, the colour was pale as cream and the Doctor thought how inglorious it was, to slay someone like this - someone formed this beautifully. A sudden sleepiness overcame him and he left the room without turning off the ventilator.

Hours had passed and when Charlie was already sound asleep, the red lamp of the robotic surgery assistant turned green.


End file.
